Mood: Tired. Ranty. In need of a hunk of a man to bake me cookies so I can stress eat.

There is a specific, suffocating hell to a conversation with a leftist who has decided that voting is a moral failing.

It feels like trying to explain the concept of "drowning" to someone who is standing on dry land, criticizing the aesthetic quality of the life raft. They talk about "purity" and "burning it all down," and their voices have the smooth, frictionless quality of people who have never had their survival threatened by a change in bureaucratic font size.

They tell me that nobody is progressive enough. They tell me the system is broken.

I know. I feel the broken edges of this system against my skin every single day. I know the machinery is rusted and hostile because I am the one getting caught in the gears.

But here is the difference between us: To them, voting is an identity. It is a mood board. It is a public statement of the soul. If the candidate doesn't align perfectly with their spirit, they withhold their vote like it’s a precious jewel that cannot be sullied.

To me, voting is not an identity. It is a mechanic. It is a piece of duct tape. It is a shim.

And I always, always use the shim.

I do not talk to these people about strategy because they do not understand the difference between morality and logistics. They think refusing to vote is a "statement." I think refusing to vote is a surrender. It is a way of telling me you are comfortable enough to survive fascism, so you don't mind letting it in the front door just to teach the Democrats a lesson.

When you are disabled, when you are poor, "harm reduction" isn't a buzzword. It is the difference between a bruise and a broken bone. It is the difference between losing a program that feeds you and keeping it for one more agonizing, underfunded year.

So, I vote.

Local elections. National elections. School boards. Judges. I vote in every single one.

I do the research. I listen to the candidates. I find the person who is the most progressive, or, frankly, the person who is the least likely to actively hunt my community for sport. I know they will never do everything I want. I know they are beholden to corporate donors. I know the Democratic party is a disappointment engine running on fumes and nostalgia.

But I am not voting for a savior. I am voting for an opponent I can negotiate with.

This is the part that the online purists miss. They view politics as a romance—they want to fall in love with a leader. I view politics as physics. I am looking for leverage.

When I cast a ballot for a corporate Democrat over a fascist, I am not endorsing their soul. I am choosing the terrain of the battlefield. I am choosing to fight on a field where I might be ignored, rather than on a field where I will be liquidated.

I vote to buy time. That’s it. That is the strategy.

We need time to build community. We need time to establish mutual aid networks. We need time to organize, to feed each other, to build the structures that will actually save us.

If a Republican wins, that time evaporates. The atmosphere changes. The pressure drops. The noise of survival becomes so deafening that we cannot hear each other to organize. We spend 100% of our energy just trying not to die, trying to protect our friends from deportation, from institutionalization, from violence. We stop building; we start hiding.

A Democrat—even a mediocre, frustrating one—acts as a buffer. They are a doorstop. They keep the door cracked open just an inch, just enough for us to breathe, just enough for us to do the real work.

I have a Republican acquaintance. We are not friends—the friction between our worldviews is too abrasive for friendship—but we talk. He likes me more than I like him, mostly because he thinks my disability makes me a tragedy he can be kind to.

He told me something once, his voice heavy with a terrifying, calm confidence. He said, "I don't worry about Republicans losing. The leftists, the ones who really hate us? They don't vote. They stay home because they're mad at their own side. We count on that."

He wasn't gloating. He was stating a fact of engineering. He knows the math. He knows that his side views voting as a weapon, while my side views voting as a valentine. As long as the left treats the ballot box like a purity test, the right will win by default.

I hear the slogan constantly: "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

It rings in my ears like a tinnitus of bad logic.

Do you not hear the gears grinding? They are trying to make it illegal. Every single day. They are closing polling places in Black neighborhoods. They are purging voter rolls. They are creating ID laws that specifically target the poor and the disabled.

Why would they spend millions of dollars and decades of effort trying to stop you from doing something if it didn't matter?

They are building walls around the ballot box because they know it is a point of failure for their power. They know that if we actually used the leverage we have, the machine would jam.

When I vote, I am not "blindly checking a box." I am engaging in a quiet, boring, essential act of strategy and self-defense.

I am using the system's own bureaucracy to clog its worst impulses. I am finding the person who will speak to—or at least not actively silence—my disability needs. I am looking for the candidate who acknowledges that the Americans with Disabilities Act exists, even if they don't fund it enough.

Is it exhausting?

God, yes.

I am so tired. I am tired of choosing between "active malice" and "benevolent neglect." I am tired of the lesser of two evils. My muscles ache from holding the door open.

But I do not have the luxury of fatigue.

Voting is not the work. Voting is the chore we do so that we can do the work.

The real work is building the coalition. It is the mutual aid. It is feeding your neighbors. It is creating a community that is so tightly woven that we can catch each other when the state fails.

But you cannot build that community effectively when you are constantly under siege. You cannot plant a garden during a bombing run.

There will always be people who disappear when things get "easy." There are fairweather allies who only care about politics when it's trending, who engage in mutual aid for the aesthetic and then vanish when the crisis creates a little friction.

But for those of us who stay? For those of us who know that "easy" is just a pause in the violence? We need every inch of ground we can get.

We defend the people who stay. We defend the people who build. And we do that by being strategic, not morally righteous.

I don't care if you feel "dirty" voting for a centrist. I don't care if it ruins your vibe. Wash your hands afterward.

I care about strategy. I care about the fact that my healthcare, my housing, and my physical safety are on the line.

If you refuse to vote because the candidate isn't perfect, you aren't a revolutionary. You are a roadblock. You are standing in the doorway, blocking the only exit, complaining about the paint color while the rest of us are choking on the smoke.

Get out of the way. Or better yet—pick up a bucket and help us hold the line.

If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed.